Moshi VS Picasso

Honestly, when you look at a build.gradle.kts written by someone who knows what they're doing, it's not that bad (that reminds me, I should really clean up the build.gradle.kts on my personal project, I haven't heavily edited it since I knew a lot less about gradle...). For example, here's the build.gradle.kts for Moshi, a JSON serialization library from Square. It uses the root build.gradle.kts for the project a bit, which is here. The root one is a little more complex, but that's mostly because it has to deal with a multi-release build and has to configure a few plugins, like dokka. (If you're wondering where all the library versions are, they're here, using a new feature in Gradle you might like: The version catalog)

Moshi

This approach is also used by square/moshi. You can also refer this.

Best practice in Android would be Moshi, which is written by many of the same authors as Gson but is still actively maintained. It's more or less a breaking upgrade from Gson.

Thanks for the info. Just checked the GitHub and it is indeed the case that Gson is not maintained anymore. The main dev left Google it seems and therefore abandoned Gson. He and some other people however created a new project called Moshi that's probably intended as a kind of Gson 3.0: https://github.com/square/moshi the last commit was three months ago and there are a crowd of contributors listed so I guess that's the better option than ye olde Gson.

Java annotations have enabled compile-time reflection since Java 1.6, and of course it has been used for serialization: https://github.com/square/moshi/#codegen

JSON de/serialization: Kotlin serialization, Moshi

However i am getting an error "Expected BEGIN-ARRAY but was BEGIN-OBJECT at $". Looking over the moshi documentation (https://github.com/square/moshi) I think I need to use an adapter as my JSON response starts with "{ }" not the expected "[ ]". I am just struggling to understand how to implement the adapter as I think the built in adapter should work.

Moshi users are currently blocked to update until Moshi 1.13.0 is released: https://github.com/square/moshi/issues/1368

Picasso

You can also take a look at Coil, Picasso or Glide which usually have some kind of crossfade animation when the image loads.

Image loading: Glide, Picasso, Coil, Fresco

picasso (Apache 2.0);